Sunday, January 31, 2010

Rajendra Pachauri was apparently too busy to check into glaciergate problems in December. We now know why. Instead of proofreading climate articles, Pachauri has been busy launching a softcore novel about the sexual adventures of a climate expert in his late 60s.

He must be following in our beloved Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd's footsteps. Kevin recently found time to write a children's book.

By page 16, climatologist Sanjay is ready for his first liaison with May in a hotel room in Nainital. “She then led him into the bedroom,” writes Dr Pachauri.

“She removed her gown, slipped off her nightie and slid under the quilt on his bed… Sanjay put his arms around her and kissed her, first with quick caresses and then the kisses becoming longer and more passionate.

“May slipped his clothes off one by one, removing her lips from his for no more than a second or two.

“Afterwards she held him close. ‘Sandy, I’ve learned something for the first time today. You are absolutely superb after meditation. Why don’t we make love every time immediately after you have meditated?’.”

More follows, including Sanjay and friends queuing to have sexual encounters with Sajni, an impoverished but willing local: “Sanjay saw a shapely dark-skinned girl lying on Vinay’s bed. He was overcome by a lust that he had never known before … He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.”

Now go take a cold shower.

No doubt there will be many budding climatologists enrolling in Obfuscation 101 to get in on the hot action before it is too late.

Suprise! It is G, have a chauffeur drive him in a traditional petrol consuming car the grand distance of 1 mile to the office.

It is always amusing to see how, without fail, those that tell we peasants to catch the bus or cycle to work always have a reason to use private cars and private jets to get around. The IPCC provides us with tips on how to cut our carbon footprint and one would think it’s Chairman would be leading the charge in his own backyard. There is always a good reason why those peddling the lie of immenant global catastrophy do not use the bus, walk or cycle.

He spends much of his time travelling and speaking on climate change at international fora and jokes he "lives at 30,000 feet".

Jokes?!! His emissions (I mean emissions due to him) are destroying the world -doesn't he take his own IPCC's reports seriously?

Even as he constantly roams the world putting tons and tons of planet-killing CO2 in the atmosphere, while joking about it, he wants you to "give up cars or all of the other good things in life that represent achievement for human civilization".

The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

Let’s refresh our memories of a few lies that the Chairman of the IPCC Dr Pachauri has told which relates directly to the above embarrassing findings. This is from a meeting of the Commenwealth Club in June 2008,

PACHAURI: “The point is you have a transparent, comprehensive, extremely widespread process involving the best scientists and experts from all over the world telling you that climate change is for real.

“And this is not something that the authors working on IPCC reports have invented. This is based on peer-reviewed literature. That’s the manner in which the IPCC functions.

“We don’t pick up a newspaper article and based on that come up with our findings. This is on the basis of very rigorous research which has stood the test of scrutiny through peer reviews.

Well in fact your IPCC does pic up magazine articles and come up with findings Dr Pachauri. You are a liar.

For the missing in action global alarmist, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, this will be more devastating news that he has yet to address with the Australian people. Recall that in November 2009 Kevin Rudd met with Pachauri in India at Pachauri’s TERI headquarters and committed tens of millions of Australian taxpayer dollars in funding. Refer to this article in The Australian,

During his lightning 36-hour visit to India last month Kevin Rudd met with Dr Pachauri at the TERI headquarters in New Delhi where he announced $71 million in funding for joint Indian-Australian scientific research and fellowship programs.

While the aged in Australia wait for life saving operations and decent aged care, while taxpayers wait for hospital services and Australia’s massive debt remains unpaid, PM Kevin Rudd continues to emit Australian taxpayer dollars to deeply suspect overseas organisations for no benefit to Australians faster than the CO2 emissions are emitted from the exhaust of his jet while he trots around the gloabe embaressing the people of Australia with his sycophantic ways.

Where are you Kevin? You relied on the IPCC assessments for Australia’s climate policy and the expenditure of vast sums of money. What have YOU to say, as Prime Minister, on the continuing revelations re the IPCC? Millions of Australians await your answer with interest – however none of us are holding our breath.

Here’s a screen capture of Kevin meeting with his mate Pachauri in India taken from a video (left of shot) before handing over $71M dollars on behalf of Australian taxpayers.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) blames Melbourne’s equal warmest overnight temperature of 30.6 degrees, on January 12 on the heat island effect. The previous time the city was that hot overnight was February 1, 1902.

Melbourne recorded its equal warmest overnight temperature, 30.6 degrees, on January 12. The previous time the city was that hot overnight was February 1, 1902.

A meteorologist at the bureau, Harvey Stern, said that Melbourne suffered from a heat island effect, in which a city is warmer than the surrounding countryside.

This was the case especially at night, because of heat stored in bricks and concrete and trapped between close-packed buildings.

I am stunned if that is correct firstly because BOM isn't blaming Global Warming and secondly that the urban heat island effect directly receives the blame. With faults in the 2007 IPCC's AR4 now pouring out I guess it is not suprising that attributions of weather events are now, shall we say, possibly becoming more circumspect.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

U.K. authorities said the British university at the center of a controversy over hacked emails on climate-change research broke the law by failing to comply with requests for raw data about global warming, but that too much time has elapsed for the institution to be prosecuted.

The U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office said breaches of the Freedom of Information Act require action by the authorities within six months of an offense taking place.

The requests for information by climate researchers were submitted in 2007 and 2008, and the alleged efforts to thwart them came to light only recently.

The university, not individuals who may have held back information, would have been subject to prosecution.

The university, which hasn't admitted wrongdoing, said the ICO's opinion that it had breached the law was a "source of grave concern to the University." The university's vice chancellor, Edward Acton, said it was scrutinizing its handling of Freedom of Information Act requests as part of the independent review.

Considered the climate Bible by governments around the world, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is meant to be a scientific analysis of the most authoritative research.

Instead, it references literature generated by Greenpeace - an organization known more for headline-grabbing publicity stunts than sober-minded analysis. (Eight IPCC-cited Greenpeace publications are listed at the bottom of this post.)

In one section of this Nobel-winning report, climate change is linked to coral reef degradation. The sole source for this claim? A Greenpeace report titled "Pacific in Peril" (see Hoegh-Guldberg below). Here the report relies on a Greenpeace document to establish the lower-end of an estimate involving solar power plants (Aringhoff).

When discussing solar energy elsewhere, the report references two Greenpeace documents in one sentence. Here it uses a Greenpeace paper as its sole means of documenting where the "main wind-energy investments" are located globally (Wind).

...

Thus, we read on page 14 that, "According to a WHO study, as many as 160,000 people are dying each year as a result of climate change." Should we care to double-check this claim, we're on our own.

As incredible as it sounds, this publication/brochure is itself cited in the Nobel-winning IPCC report as evidence that a particular statement is true. Appearing in the list below as Greenpeace 2006, it is one of two references mentioned in a single sentence, as discussed above.

Which begs an important question: how did it get into the same room with serious scholars? Why would it even be under consideration by a scientific body tasked with producing an assessment of the latest scientific research?

There appears to be an interesting chronology here. First Teske is granted "scientific expert reviewer" status by the IPCC. Second, a non-academic, non-peer-reviewed document in which he was closely involved gets added to the climate change research canon by virtue of it being cited by the Nobel-winning report.

Third, Teske co-authors a new Greenpeace report that receives an extra measure of prestige when it features a forward authored by the high-profile IPCC chairman. Fourth, in a final flourish, Teske - like his Greenpeace colleauge von Goerne - gets elevated to lead author status of yet another IPCC special report (on renewable energy) due to be published this year.

Where does Greenpeace stop and the IPCC begin? Sometimes it's difficult to tell.

Read the link and see the list of Greenpeace citations used in IPCC AR4.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

And so it came to pass , the great exodus had begun, and all manner of scoundrel hid among the crowd hoping to go unnoticed, hoping to change their colours over time so as to escape recognition when the judgment came upon them.

Two days ago I posted that two high profile scientists were changing their rhetoric. First was UK Chief Scientist Prof John Beddington who no longer thought it was healthy to dismiss skeptics, called for a new paradigm of “openness” and stated that climate science was fundamentally uncertain. Then there was Canada’s most well known alarmist climate scientist Andrew Weaver turning on the IPCC chairman Pachauria and calling for his resignation declaring the IPCC tainted by political advocacy and calling for its approach to science to be overhauled.

There has also been an editorial in a recent leading alarmist journal, Nature, calling for more engagement with skeptics.

Obviously the IPCC has been severely damaged and its credibility is in tatters. The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, despite stating that man made global warming was the greatest moral issue of our time late last year, has failed to make any speech since Copenhagen on this great issue. His silence is deafening.

As the rats push and shove to desert the sinking ship, the SS IPCC, we can return to the subject of my first post on this blog, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Penny Sackett. Penny Sackett is also singing to a different tune from that of only 2 months ago.

Professor Sackett said there was no real dispute within the scientific community about the reality of climate change but she wanted non-scientists to have greater access to the evidence to help inform the necessary public debate about crafting policy responses to the problem.

"The public must be provided with the best possible advice," Professor Sackett said.

"It must have available to it some understanding or the ability to develop an understanding about which issues the science is quite clear on and where there is less precision in our understanding."

For example, Professor Sackett said, while the reality of climate change was clearly understood, there was less certainty about its effects on rainfall patterns in Australia. More research was required before conclusions could be drawn with any scientific confidence.

“For example, regional climate change projections indicate that we are likely to see an increase in the frequency and intensity of wildfires (predominately in south-eastern Australia), an increase in the severity of cyclones, decreased rainfall (except in the far north), increased incidence of drought, and an increase in extreme temperatures.”

Note that well. Two months ago Sackett was saying that global warming would cause, amongst other things, decreased rainfall and increased drought in Australia and two months later she says more research was required before conclusions could be drawn with any scientific confidence.

Of course Penny is known for her hysterical alarmism. On 4 December 2009 she predicted that in 5 years (by December 2014) the planet would face disastrous global warming. I was so impressed with this prediction I even placed a countdown clock on my original post about this when I started my blog so I can schedule my immanent destruction. I’ve blocked out 4 December 2014 in my Outlook calendar as “unavailable due to disastrous global warming for remainder of century”.

Sackett has placed herself in a difficult position. She has realised she in a hole and has sensibly stopped digging, but still clings to the “science is settled” mantra. At the same time, she has put herself at odds with Rudd’s outlandish claims.

Even Penny Sackett’s rainfall prediction of November 2009 seems at odds with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) which is also known for its alarmist announcements. If we look at the graph from its Annual Australian Climate Statement for 2009 reproduced below we see that in fact the BOM graphs shows the last decade to be the second wettest decade on record and 2000 the wettest year on record in a decade which, according to BOM’s pasteurised and homogenised data is the warmest decade on record. This is completely at odds with Penny’s statement. Her prior statements on expected sea level rises are also overstated and alarmist in nature.

Why is it these three very prominent scientists in their respective countries are now singing a different tune? Have they detected a groundswell of opinion placing them in danger of being marginalised? Why would that concern them if their motives were objective science? Perhaps they are merely heeding Nature magazine's call for engagement of contrary points of view. Whatever their motives it is certain that they won’t be the last to deny their alarmist beliefs so strongly held until a matter of days ago.

Although not a religious person, I am reminded of the story in Mathew of Peter denying Christ.

Then he began to curse and to swear, "I don't know the man!" Immediately the cock crowed. (26:75)Peter remembered the word which Jesus had said to him, "Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times." He went out and wept bitterly.

In his Second Annual Letter, Bill Gates who know conducts innovative aid related programs through his private foundation full time has some very interesting things to say. Amongst them are some thoughts relating to the possible financial and human affects of diverting funds from aid to climate change. He calculates that if only 1% of the proposed $100 billion funding goal of Copenhagen comes from vaccine funding then 700,000 children could die.

Read what Bill Gates has to say.

“Deficits are not the only reason that aid budgets might change. Governments will also be increasing the money they spend to help reduce global warming. The final communiqué of the Copenhagen Summit, held last December, talks about mobilizing $10 billion per year in the next three years and $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries, which is over three quarters of all foreign aid now given by the richest countries.

I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health. If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases.”

I have seen people scoff at the idea that ill considered funding for climate change could cause millions to die. Many seem to think that resources are endless and that incorrect allocation of those resources will have no consequences. I urge that Bill’s words be given proper consideration.

We have in fact already seen aid funds diverted to climate in the way bill suggests. In the Guardian on 25 Jan 2010,

“A £1.5bn pledge by Gordon Brown to help poor countries cope with the ravages of climate change will drain funds from existing overseas aid programmes to improve health, education and water supplies, the government admitted today.

The move, revealed in an email exchange between campaigners and an official at the Department for International Development (DfiD), appears to undermine repeated government pledges that such climate aid should be additional to existing overseas development aid (ODA).”

On his personal web site in an article referred to on this blog recently Bill proposes that if global warming is a problem (and he does not state that it is) the appropriate course of action is innovation. Governments roll would be to fund basic R & D. Bill is convinced that within 20 years we could find a replacement technology for electricity and power production that would be less costly than coal. He predicts that it would only take another 20 years to bring that to market and replace older technologies. The focus on ineffective strategies (see prior post on this blog) should be replaced by focusing and harnessing the massive parallelism of our industrial, technological and economic base to bring about the future technologies we need.

“One area that I have been spending a lot of personal time on is energy and its effect on climate. The most important innovation required to avoid climate change will be a way of producing electricity that is cheaper than coal and that emits no greenhouse gases. There will be a huge market for this, and governments should supply large amounts of funding for basic R&D. Because the foundation invests in areas where there is not a big market, I have not yet seen a way that we can play a unique role here, but I am investing in several ideas outside the foundation. I am surprised that the climate debate hasn’t focused more on encouraging R&D since it is critical to getting to zero emissions. Still, I think it is likely that out of the many possible approaches, at least one scalable innovation will emerge in the next 20 years and be installed widely in the 20 years after that.”

At this time there is no hard evidence to prove that CO2 is causing global warming so I think that should be the first priority. There is no point fixing a problem that does not exist. If that is established in the future then I think Bill Gates has broadly mapped out the best approach we have seen to date.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The credibility of the IPCC has reached a new all time low. Another leading warmist scientist, this time the UK’s Chief Scientist Prof John Beddington is deserting ship.

The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser.

Beddington states in the Times Online:

“I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism. Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.”

...

“I think, wherever possible, we should try to ensure there is openness and that source material is available for the whole scientific community.”

Climate science fundamentally uncertain!? That is the first time we have heard anything but the mantra, the science is settled from an alarmist scientist. Utterly astonishing. Just as astonishing:

Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, said: “Climate scientists get kudos from working on an issue in the public eye but with that kudos comes responsibility. Being open with data is part of that responsibility.”

It is astonishing because from the Climategate emails leaked in December 2009 the now stood down Prof Phil "Hide the Decline" Jones former head of the CRU at the University of East Anglia we have this email response from him after repeated request for data:

“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

This talk of openess is totally new for the alarmist scientists. Obviously seeing the way the wind is blowing the more astute are now urging a total change of approach. The IPCC has obviously taken some heavy damage in the last couple of weeks with revelation of known errors being published for political reasons.

Canada’s leading climate scientist is also deserting ship! When not one but two leading Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming admirals desert the IPCC you can be sure it is damaged. These two scientists, as well as some others are pulling back now while the going is good.

A catastrophic heat wave appears to be closing in on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. How hot is it getting in the scientific kitchen where they’ve been cooking the books and spicing up the stew pots? So hot, apparently, that Andrew Weaver, probably Canada’s leading climate scientist, is calling for replacement of IPCC leadership and institutional reform.

If Andrew Weaver is heading for the exits, it’s a pretty sure sign that the United Nations agency is under monumental stress. Mr. Weaver, after all, has been a major IPCC science insider for years. He is Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, mastermind of one of the most sophisticated climate modelling systems on the planet, and lead author on two recent landmark IPCC reports. For him to say, as he told Canwest News yesterday, that there has been some “dangereous crossing” of the line between climate advocacy and science at the IPCC is stunning in itself.

Not only is Mr. Weaver an IPCC insider. He has also, over the years, generated his own volume of climate advocacy that often seemed to have crossed that dangereous line between hype and science. It is Mr. Weaver, for example, who said the IPCC’s 2007 science report — the one now subject to some scrutiny —“isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles.”

He has also made numerous television appearances linking current weather and temperature events with global warming, painting sensational pictures and dramatic links. “When you see these [temperature] numbers, it’s screaming out at you: ‘This is global warming!

People often present two timeframes that we should have as goals for CO2 reduction – 30% (off of some baseline) by 2025 and 80% by 2050.

I believe the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050.

But we tend to focus on the first one since it is much more concrete.

We don’t distinguish properly between things that put you on a path to making the 80% goal by 2050 and things that don’t really help.

To make the 80% goal by 2050 we are going to have to reduce emissions from transportation and electrical production in participating countries down to zero.

You will still have emissions from other activities including domestic animals, making fertilizer, and decay processes.

There will still be countries that are too poor to participate.

If the goal is to get the transportation and electrical sectors down to zero emissions you clearly need innovation that leads to entirely new approaches to generating power.

Should society spend a lot of time trying to insulate houses and telling people to turn off lights or should it spend time on accelerating innovation?

If addressing climate change only requires us to get to the 2025 goal, then efficiency would be the key thing.

But you can never insulate your way to anything close to zero no matter what advocates of resource efficiency say. You can never reduce consumerism to anything close to zero.

Because 2025 is too soon for innovation to be completed and widely deployed, behavior change still matters.

Still, the amount of CO2 avoided by these kinds of modest reduction efforts will not be the key to what happens with climate change in the long run.

In fact it is doubtful that any such efforts in the rich countries will even offset the increase coming from richer lifestyles in places like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, etc.

Innovation in transportation and electricity will be the key factor.

One of the reasons I bring this up is that I hear a lot of climate change experts focus totally on 2025 or talk about how great it is that there is so much low hanging fruit that will make a difference.

This mostly focuses on saving a little bit of energy, which by itself is simply not enough. The need to get to zero emissions in key sectors almost never gets mentioned. The danger is people will think they just need to do a little bit and things will be fine.

If CO2 reduction is important, we need to make it clear to people what really matters – getting to zero.

With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed.

However all the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.

To achieve the kinds of innovations that will be required I think a distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement is the key. There just isn’t enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go.

“But Syed Hasnain, the Indian glaciologist erroneously quoted as making the 2035 prediction, said that responsibility had to lie with them. “It is the lead authors — blame goes to them,” he told The Times. “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report.”

Professor Hasnain, who was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, said that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Dr Pachauri.

He said he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999, although he blamed the journalist for assigning the actual date.

He said that he did not tell Dr Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes at the time.

“I was keeping quiet as I was working here,” he said. “My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?” ”

So, it appears that a scientist who knew the report was rubbish kept quiet because he worked for Pachauri and because you do not point out mistakes if you know the might of the IPCC. This chimes perfectly with the atmosphere of bullying, intimidation and jobs for the boys revealed in the CRU emails.

I am amazed that the grown-ups of the scientific community (mathematicians, physicists, chemists, astronomers etc) seem content to stand back and allow the reputation of science and the scientific method to be trashed in the minds of the general public. It is high time they stepped in and provided some adult supervision.

So we now have Andy “Hide the Funding” Pitman failing to be able to discuss facts and instead resorting to describing his own absurd version of reality in an ABC interview. He claims scientists for the IPCC receive no funding. Did $63,400 in funding somehow slip your mind Andy during the publicly broadcast interview with the ABC?

Read Andrew Bolt’s article and see Andy fail to mention his funding whilst accusing skeptics of being unemployed and "so well funded". Excuse me Andy, I think your slip is showing.

Professor Andy Pitman, an Australian IPCC author, says his side is losing the global warming debate simply because they’re all selfless angels, while the other side are corrupt, deceitful and unemployed conspiracists:

ELEANOR HALL: How much damage then do you think this sort of sloppiness on the part of the IPCC has done?

ANDY PITMAN: Oh, my personal view is that climate scientists are losing the fight with the sceptics. That the sceptics are so well funded, so well organised, have nothing else to do. They kind of don’t have day jobs. They can put all of their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the general public whereas the climate scientists have day jobs and this actually isn’t one of them.

All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily for no funding and no pay whereas the sceptics are being funded to put out full-scale misinformation campaigns and are doing a damn good job I think. They are doing a superb job at misinforming and miscommunicating the general public, state and federal governments.

That explains everything to Pitman’s satisfaction. The absence of any proof for his absurd claims explains everything to the rest of us.

Oh, and here’s a list of Pitman’s grants. My word, but he seems well funded by the warmist lobby. Oddly enough for a man who claims he does his IPCC work “out of hours, voluntarily for no funding”, his long list of grants include these:

1999-01
Australian Greenhouse Office (for costs incurred as lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change $15,000

2004-7
Australian Greenhouse Office (for costs incurred as lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change $48,400

Look, it’s just a wild hunch, but might it be that Pitman’s side is losing because the evidence is growing that its arguments are exaggerated or even false?

One would assume that a core ability of a scientist would be to address the facts but instead Andy Pitman falls immediately into schoolboy name calling and bullying and fails totally to address facts. Is this the kind of "scientist" we want representing Australia at taxpayer's expense at the UN? Perhaps indeed he is, afterall, a perfect fit for the IPCC based on the many revealed errors in the 2007 IPCC's AR4 report.

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming scientists seem to do an extremely poor job of communicating their arguments to the public. Surely one can be found that doesn't decend into gratuitious name calling in a public broadcast. Perhaps not.

Why are so many of the IPCC “scientists” so misleading and even dishonest? Are there any amongst them that can open their mouths and speak, well, the actual truth for a change?

Climategate – the “leak” is strongly suspected of coming from within the CRU and is not a hack.

Prof Phil “Hide the Decline” Jones – under investigation and stood down as head of the CRU.

Chairman of IPCC Raj Pachauri – denies Glaciergate after scientists debunk widely circulated lie in UN report that glaciers would melt by 2035 calling it “Voodoo science” and following further pressure later relents admitting “mistake” but everything else is “robust”.

Pachauri blames lead IPCC author for Claciergate “mistake”, lead author blames reviewing scientists, reviewing scientists blame 500 external reviewers. Scientist advises he had advised the panel in writing of the error prior to publication. IPCC scientist says he never got the letter. Conclusion, the Easter Bunny is to blame.

Pachauri states he will not step down as financial gains are linked to carbon fiasco through his TERI group.

The IPCC also made false predictions on the Amazon rain forests, referenced to a non peer-reviewed paper produced by an advocacy group working with the WWF. This time though, the claim made is not even supported by the report and seems to be a complete fabrication

Thus, following on from "Glaciergate", where the IPCC grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on Himalayan glaciers – backed by a reference to a WWF report - we now have "Amazongate", where the IPCC has grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest.

The author Richard North follows the IPCC citations to the original source and what does he find? The “peer reviewed scientific literature” was authored by a journalist and a policy hack. No more comment is necessary.

It is a brave or stupid person that attempts to debate Christopher Monckton publicly on global warming and climate change. Monckton has an encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject and routinely trashes “qualified scientists” who usually fail to be able to cite and discuss the facts from memory.

Check out this brief “debate” on Australia’s Sunrise show. The interviewer is Koch, a warmist presenter. Even so we see Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) scientists offer himself up to the sacrificial alter that is Monckton and shown to be sadly lacking.

See at around the 2:30 mark on the video where climatologist Ben McNeil after stating that the “science is over; it’s not debateable” becomes speechless opening and closing his mouth repeatedly like a stranded goldfish, but nothing comes out. Perhaps there is nothing inside to come out? After Ben fails to present ANY actual facts conclusively linking greenhouse gas to global warming and even shooting himself in the foot by quoting a 150 year temperature rise that could have nothing to do with industrial activity going back that far (and don’t forget he is a “professional” scientist, Monckton is not, although he is published), Monckton rattles off detailed and fairly complex maths on climatology. Ben, had he been at all prepared and widely read would have known about these facts as I do, and been in a position to discuss them rationally. At near collapse with his self inflicted virtual reality imploding about him, and failing to put forward any actual arguments, Ben childishly reverts to squealing,

“to somehow discredit what we ahh do in our lives, in our professional lives is outrageous!”

Now that’s a withering argument supporting catestrohphic anthropogenic global warming if I ever heard one. Basically Ben is saying, I can’t be wrong and I can’t be questioned! The fact is thousands of scientists, including some of the greatest scientific experts currently living like physicist Professor Emeritus Freeman Dyson do question your “evidence” Ben. Are you saying that Dyson, who is acknowledged as possibly the greatest currently living scientist on the planet, is outrageous because he doesn’t agree with you Ben? That is not an argument Ben. Enough said.

Monckton remains cool and collected throughout whilst calmly demolishing the weak Ben McNeil, professional climatologist, for the audience in the limited time available.

Just after half way through the debate, Ben throws in the towel and turns back to Koch who tries to come to his rescue. Monckton once again scores with telling points.

Just a tip for CAGW scientists who want to step into the ring with Monckton; although you are paid to know your facts by us, the taxpayers of Australia, when you go toe to toe with Lord Monckton you are going to have to stop writing those fanciful papers about global extinction and other global catastrophies and actually know your facts or you are not going to last through the first round.

Ding Ding, Next!

On Monckton's last point where he states of the millions of lives that could be lost through diverting funds from relif and medical aide to a non existant CAGW issue, I iwll be posting two articles by Bill Gates this week, the second of which deals with this very issue. A lot of people in government jobs like scientists seem to have no idea that resources are limited and that diverting even more resources to CAGW will indeed have effects elsewhere. To simplify for CAGW scientists, imagine resources are cookies in a cookie jar. The more you take out the less you have left. Get it?

The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are…uhhhhh…never mind.

Turns out the IPCC’s chicken little story that all the Himalayan glaciers are melting is just another exaggeration. Or fraud. Take your choice. You know, like the stats coming out of East Anglia CRU. And its claim that Antarctica is melting. And that Greenland’s ice cap is melting. And that sea levels are rising. And that the polar bears are dying. Fact is, some glaciers are retreating, but many others around the world are growing.

“But how is that possible? How can glaciers be growing when the world is warming up like a package of Jiffy-Pop in a microwave?”

Here are a dozen glaciers (or groups of glaciers) around the world that are growing almost as quickly as global warming skepticism.
...

In the Western Himalayas, a group of some 230 glaciers are bucking the global warming trend.

Perched on the soaring Karakoram mountains in the Western Himalayas, a group of some 230 glaciers are bucking the global warming trend. They're growing.

Throughout much of the Tibetan Plateau, high-altitude glaciers are dwindling in the face of rising temperatures. The situation is potentially dire for the hundreds of millions of people living in China, India and throughout southeast Asia who depend on the glaciers for their water supply.

But in the rugged western corner of the plateau, the story is different, according to a new study. Among legendary peaks of Mt. Everest like K2 and Nanga Parbat, glaciers with a penthouse view of the world are growing, and have been for almost three decades.

"These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world," John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha said. "And all of them are either holding still, or advancing."

When Shroder and a team of researchers examined satellite imagery of the region's glaciers dating back to 1960, they found that 87 glaciers had surged forward during that time, sliding down into lower elevations. An analysis of gravity signatures in the region also suggests the glaciers are growing in mass, and have been since at least 1980.

The team's work will be published in a forthcoming issue of Annals of Glaciology.

We can only assume that the media here in Australia have been too busy with breathless shots of Tiger Wood’s 12 on the side fiasco to inform the public here about this little inconvenient fact.

Looks like self inflicted power black outs in the most industrialised country in the world, the USA, are not far off for some communities. Interestingly not much thought seems to have been given by our noble overlords that in business increased risk means greater returns are required, thus more costs for consumers and greater lead times on capital investment. In fact capital investment may need to be forgone entirely if the economic environment is uncertain.

Now that might be an inconvenience if it is a factory not being built but when it is a power plant that will not be upgraded then everything just stops. No power for lighting, cooking, hospitals, water pumps, fuel pumps, you name it. A district with unreliable power supplies will also be unable to attract industry which will instead locate to an area where supply is reliable thus leading to the economic as well as social impoverishment of the affected district.

Welcome to the 15 Missouri communities served by Sho-Me Power forced to look for new power supply. Marshfield-based Sho-Me Power sent notices to the 15 communities in December saying it can no longer sell them electricity after Christmas of 2013 on a long-term basis.

Associated Electric, which sells power wholesale to Sho-Me Power, is scaling back on selling electricity to municipal utilities because of an uncertain future in generating additional energy, said spokeswoman Nancy Southworth.
Proposals in Congress to rein in carbon dioxide emissions believed to be contributing to man-made global climate change have brought any plans to build or invest in new coal-burning power plants to a halt.

"Looking 20 years out, it gets very difficult to do that in today's environment," Hartman said. "It's an uncertain future on coal and it takes a few years to build (a plant)."

Monday, January 25, 2010

Lord Monckton landed in Sydney, Australia on the 21st January and immediately jumped another aircraft to fly 4,000 km to Perth, West Australia where he met with Jo Nova and others at a skeptics social event.

Before attending any events please confirm details with John Smeed johnsmeed@adna.com.au as details may change.

The next week or two should be very entertaining as we watch our PM, Kevin Rudd, trying to avoid Monckton and stay silent on AGW. Rudd is currently galavanting around Australia beating the election drum already but I would bet a substantial sum he will maintain his mute stance on climate change as he has done since emerging from his failed COP15 fiasco. He will blab on as usual about grand schemes, fail to spell out any viable action, and studiously continue to ignore "the greatest moral issue of our time" (as he has stated) ie. AGW! He will also be trying to hush up his his personal tour of Pachauri’s TERI facility, the photos of hand shakes with the carbon conman and those pledges of millions of dollars (h/t Bulldust on WUWT).

Your pathetic Kev; just pathetic. I feel somewhat sorry for Penny Wong and Julia Gillard having to cover for you when the going gets tough.

How does the saying go; “Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive” (Sir Walter Scott 1808).

We've had the Climategate emails resulting in leading IPCC scientists Prof Phil "Hide the Decline" Jones being investigated and stood down as head of the Climatic Research Unit as well as Prof Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann also being investigated by his Penn State University employer. We have the Chairman of the IPCC, Raj Pachauri, being called to resign after use of incorrect and non-reviewed data on Himalayan glaciers was included in the IPCC's 2007 AR4 report as reported yesterday in this blog, and now we have another major error in that same report as published in the Times Online.

UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

...

Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen "must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm".

...

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.

That is not the end of it. There is more coming out as you read this. Stay tuned.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. ‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation. According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF. It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121. Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air. Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25. ‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said. ‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’

One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’

When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’. Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures. It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them. For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked. The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue. Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.

The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable. Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.

Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.

A comment by a reader on WUWT, Martin Brumby on WUWT, Martin Brumby comments on the fake data used by the IPCC in the 2007 IPCC AR4 report which stated Himalayan glaciers would dissapear by 2035.

Martin Brumby (23:54:06) :

We need to remember that this is very far from being the first example of fraud revealed in the IPCC’s reports.

Most obviously our old friend Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick.

But also the Snows of Kilimanjaro, the spread of Tropical Disease into temperate zones, Rising Sea Levels, Species Extinction, Antartica Melting, Increased Hurricane Frequency. The list just goes on and on.

The IPCC isn’t the fruit of the toil of 2000 honest and expert Climate Scientists, which is how it has invariably been portrayed, it is a tendentious and thoroughly dishonest propaganda document designed to mislead and to promote the destruction of the economies of the developed world. And the vast majority of western politicians just went along with it, due to their scientific ignorance and the fact that they had deliberately appointed some of the most egregious Alarmists as their ’scientific advisors’.

The only difference with the Glacier story is the fact that – very belatedly – this has been picked up by a few of the mainstream media.

Nothing else has changed.

We still have a mountain to climb. But at least we’re above the foothills.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

What a busy Sunday this has turned out to be. I am in the middle of preparing a BBQ to roast a nice leg of lamb and to enhance my carbon footprint by burning (gasp) charcoal to do so but the IPCC keeps on intruding as it just can't seem to get it's facts right. Worse than that, it uses fake data.

You know the IPCC - the mob that our government tells us they rely upon as the science is settled; the mob that organised the Copenhagen gabfest for tens of thousands from the chattering class - yep that mob.

I hope you have been keeping up with the 2007 IPCC AR4 report containing the now debunked statement that glaciers in the Himalayas will dissapear by 2035.

NASA went even further on their "evidence" web page linking to the IPCC AR4 report but stating the glaciers would dissapear by 2030. They have changed that statement without comment and deleted the link to the IPCC AR4 report. To do this without crediting and explaining the reason for the change is scientifically dishonest and misleads the public. Could it be that this is more about policy leading science rather than the other way around?

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999. The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

Dr Pachauri said that the IPCC’s report was the responsibility of the panel’s Co-Chairs at the time, both of whom have since moved on.

They were Dr Martin Parry, a British scientist now at Imperial College London, and Dr Osvaldo Canziani , an Argentine meteorologist. Neither was immediately available for comment.

“I don’t want to blame them, but typically the working group reports are managed by the Co-Chairs,” Dr Pachauri said. “Of course the Chair is there to facilitate things, but we have substantial amounts of delegation.”

He declined to blame the 25 authors and editors of the erroneous part of the report , who included a Filipino, a Mongolian, a Malaysian, an Indonesian, an Iranian, an Australian and two Vietnamese.

Over the last couple of days more shoddy "mistakes" have been found in the IPCC report including incorrect basic maths. I will post further examples in a seperate article shortly including suspicions of missapropriation of hundreds of thousands of pounds of gullible EU taxpayer's funds. How could this rubbish ever make it through the (we are told) "thousands of reviewing scientists"? Any glaciologist worth his or her salt even giving the IPCC "evidence" a passing glance would have seen the glaring errors and mistatements.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

"It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in."

Thus we now have the confirmation that has been strongly suspected for a long time. Scientists involved with IPCC AR4 have allowed glaring errors and unchecked heresay "data" to be included in the IPCC AR4 report for the express purpose of encouraging policy makers and governments to take action. Let me say that even more clearly. Scientists knowingly allow fake "data" to be published in the "gold science standard" IPCC report knowing that governments will use this to justify policy changes including but not limited to the imposition of taxes, the payment of "climate damages" to undeveloped countries and the imposition of a substantially reduced level of economic well upon citizens. Penny Wong (Minister for Changing the Climate here in Australia) for example waved that 2007 IPCC report at Senator Fielding who questioned the validity of "the science" and stated that she had to write her policy based on it. Of course she did - "the science is settled" is it not? Australian PM Kevin Rudd also relies on the IPCC. He had this to say in a 2008 60 Minutes TV interview with Tara Brown:

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I just look at what the scientists say. There's a group of scientists called the International Panel on Climate Change - 4000 of them. Guys in white coats who run around and don't have a sense of humour. They just measure things.

Note that number of scientists - it varies every time you see it from 1,500 up to 4,000. One thing the IPCC is not good at is measuring their own scientist contributors. If only the scientists involved with the IPCC were running around measuring things instead of using faked data to further grant applications, fool government policy makers and boost flagging publishing scores we might get somewhere. Unfortunately there is proof they haven't had their eye on the "settled science" very much at all.

Read the link to WUWT carefully. Especially if you are a late comer to this growing farce, read it and ask yourself is this what you want your tax system and economic policy based on. Now if you are an Australian, email your senators and MP's and ask them not to vote for Labor's Cap and Trade tax. Remember once a tax is imposed it is almost impossible to remove due to the flow on effect of government becoming dependant on the revenue stream. You'll get one shot at this - make it count.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Here in Australia there has been some questioning of the UN/IPCC/CRU Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) conjecture but for some reason, perhaps due to our geographic isolation, we have largely been quarantined by main stream media from the plethora of overseas reports promulgated in the media.

In western civilization (with the exception of Australia and possibly New Zealand) there is continuing and growing questioning of CAGW in the main stream media. We have seen leading CAGW players Prof Phil Jones of CRU fame being stood down and investigated and Prof Mann (of IPCC Hockey Stick fame) currently being investigated by Penn State University. Now the UK Parliament has seen fit to run its own investigation into Climategate and the CRU. For the terms of reference see link at WUWT which is reproduced in part here:

Terms of Reference

The Science and Technology Committee today announces an inquiry into the unauthorised publication of data, emails and documents relating to the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The Committee has agreed to examine and invite written submissions on three questions:

—What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?
—Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate (see below)?
—How independent are the other two international data sets?
The Committee intends to hold an oral evidence session in March 2010.

...

The Independent Review will:

1. Examine the hacked e-mail exchanges, other relevant e-mail exchanges and any other information held at CRU to determine whether there is any evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice and may therefore call into question any of the research outcomes.

2. Review CRU’s policies and practices for acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review and disseminating data and research findings, and their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice.

3. Review CRU’s compliance or otherwise with the University’s policies and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act (‘the FOIA’) and the Environmental Information Regulations (‘the EIR’) for the release of data.

4. Review and make recommendations as to the appropriate management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds .

The deadline for submissions is tight. The UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee asks for written submissions no later than Noon 10 February 2010 (I assume that is GMT) and any submissions must be in Microsoft Word 2003 format (ok no jokes as to why the Science and Technology Committee demands submissions to be made using software technology that is 7 years out of date).

What passes for reasoned debate here in Australia by comparison? Let us look at our beloved Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who in one of his brief stop overs here in Australia had this to say at a speech at the Lowy Institute on 6 November 2009 before jetting off again in a cloud of thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions:

“Climate change deniers are small in number, but they are too dangerous to be ignored.”

...

“This brigade of donothing climate change skeptics are dangerous because if they succeed, then it is all of us who will suffer.”

He rambles on with a peer reviewed comparison of his pet theory to a game of cards.

“You've got to know when to fold 'em and for the skeptics, that time has come.

The Government I lead will act.”

Thanks Kevin for classifying those Australians that don't agree with your views as dangerous. Perhaps, Kevin, all these dangerous people should be rounded up and interred in government re-education "facilities". I hate to point this out Kevin but you are talking about 54% of Australians according to the latest Gallop Poll research.

Yes, our Idiot In Chief will act. Fast foward one month to Copenhagen. And how did that all turn out for Kevin and his 114 man invasion force delegation? Oh yes, 3 pages of nonsense from Copenhagen in the form of an Accord (download the accord here), no deadlines, nothing binding, and no one even silly enough to sign it before the caviar had run out and everyone deserted Norway for the next Big Conference. Thank God you’re not a general leading an army. If you were I would humbly suggest that your greatest danger would be from your troops behind you and not the ones in front if your same withering display of logic was presented to them.

It makes sense to Kevin to act before he even knows the question even if it means “acting” in totally the wrong direction, such is the state of leadership in Australia. Kevin Rudd, you are truly Australia’s Greatest Living Actor.

That bunch of dangerous right wing conservative radicals Kev, the UK Labour led Parliament, on the other hand obviously doesn’t assume that the debate is so clear cut and instead is conducting an inquiry. No chance of that happening here with Kevin at the tiller.

Kev, how about acting now to pay back the massive debt you and you alone have inflicted upon we Australians,

and our children,

and our grandchildren (these last two lines were lifted from Kevin's landmark Lowy speech so I thought it appropriate to reuse them here - H/t Kev).

Act Kev. Please, act.

Impose the higher taxes necessary to solve your problem. Slash your government’s spending. Let’s see you do that without your massive Bait and Switch Tax Scheme. Then take it to an election. And please, stop your ridiculous attempt at blaming your indebtedness on former Prime Minister John Howard who left this country massively in funds – you are just embarrassing yourself. It is called responsibility Kev. Look it up in your Cantonese-English dictionary. I am sure it will be in there somewhere. See also “the buck stops here”.

Geomap

About

This blog is a about Anthropogenic Global Warming(AGW) which is global warming caused by the activities of man. The core issues are:

- Is the climate warming,- Is the warming outside of historic norms- Is it caused by anthropogenic CO2- Will it result in global disaster as the IPCC insists

Only the first has been satisfactorily answered in part and the qualification is that the data upon which the IPCC claims are based has not been made available for full scrutiny as yet. The average terrestrial land temperature experienced slight warming this century. In some regions such as Antarctica it has cooled. The earth has been recovering from the Little Ice Age since 1650 (see Akasofu 2007 & 2009) which is one reason this warming trend is expected. It appears that this is not outside of historic norms (see Medieval Warm Period) and that the IPCC and some scientists have attempted to downplay the Medieval Warm Period and the effects of the Little Ice Age. The later two issues are not settled despite UN and government spin towards the contrary. For some excellent background from a real climatologist not implicated in the recent CRU revelations see the links to Dr Roy Spencer's blog below who discusses these issues as a professional.

Australia Joins China and Iran in Net Censorship - Nanny State Cometh

Pearls of Wisdom & Otherwise

Glenn Reynolds (USA - Instapundit.com): "I'll believe its a crisis when the people who tell me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis."

Nick himself (Counting Cats in Zanzibar blog): "Is it just me or has the spam-trade been entirely taken-over by performance poets on Arts-Council grants?"

Dr. Kiminori Itoh (Phd UN IPCC Scientist Award-winning environmental physical chemist): "When people know what the truth is the will feel deceived by science and scientists."

Dr. Stephen Schneider (Stanford professor of climatology, Lead author on many IPCC reports, in an interview with Discover Magazine 1989): "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

Former US Vice President Al Gore (now, chairman and co-founder of Generation Investment Management- a London-based business that sells carbon credits, in an interview with Grist Magazine 9 May 2006 re his book An Inconvenient Truth) "Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are..."

World Climate Widget

Items of Note

New readers may be interested to peruse two of my earlier posts concerning the Fear of Global Cooling which was popular in the late 1970's. I have posted a copy of a Newsweek article together with comments here and here.